Simple is Beautiful

• Efficient editing with vIM. Also, worthy of a ready The Birth of vi on slashdot
• Advanced DnD: Heroes of the Lance and Pool of Radiance are two RPGs that were reviewed in one of the first PIXEL magazines I read - at least those are two of the games that stuck with me.
• Speaking of rather obscure games that got stuck with me, Blade Warrior for the Amiga along with Maupity Island, Murder from U.S Gold and Final Battle: The Legend of the Sword continues would fit in this category nicely. Those were the days..

I am contemplating buying a desktop PC for satisfying two needs luxuries. Last time I used a desktop PC (co-owned one with my brother) was in early 90's, our beloved Amiga. Once the Amiga was rendered obsolete I was workstation-less at home, until I got my first laptop ( HP ). Ever since then, I 've been using laptops both at home and at work.

However, my i386 based laptop ( which I use for gaming and Visual Studio ) no longer can handle some new games I am really looking forward to playing. In addition to that, I need a system which will allow me to attach storage devices to it, stuffing that storage with files and share them to our various computers at home over our LAN. Being a desktop computer, I will be able to upgrade its video graphics card when I see fit thus being able to catch up with whatever technology will be required to play whatever game with relative ease.

I already have an Audigy NX 2 (usb based) sound card by Creative, a 7.1 speakers setup, my trusty 24" Dell screen. I figure all I need is a compact box, 1G+ RAM, a video card, a motherboard and a hard disk to store our media files.

I could use my MacBook Pro for gaming ( thanks to the BootCamp ) but I just don't have enough free hard disk space to waste on a Windows parition(1) and even if I did have I would have waited for Leopard to arrive with Bootcamp stable (as opposed to current beta, yet fully functional) release(2).

Here is a 'funny' quotation I spotted on MobyGames .

I have a theory that all the money in the world wouldn't make me happy. I'm trying to get billions of dollars so I can test this theory. --Brian Hirt

GP2X is a pretty neat, open source / Linux based, video game console and media player. Its especially great for running an emulator on it and playing all those great games of the past.

RecordAmigaGames.org :Recorded amiga games, videos etc - as movies. I am going to spend a LONG time on this site..

Here is a video of Turrican II on the Amiga, level 1.

Another quotation by John Carmack. So I decided to follow his advice, given that my soul at the moment badly needs something interesting to animate it, so to speak. I 've been reading on assembly language programming ( I wrote some apps on assembler for the Amiga and x86 -- the DOS days -- but haven't touched it since ) and also browsing through Quake III's source code, generously released by the id software folks. I must tell you, it really helps. Its not that low-level, per se, but it works.

It is not a secret ( far from it ) that I love all things retro - including retro gaming. So, I though it would be a good idea to provide some links and information to those who have not had the pleasure to dive into this under-appreciated 'cult'.

Retrogaming, also known as classic gaming is the hobby of playing and collecting older computer, video, and arcade games. Games are played either on the original hardware, on modern hardware via emulation, or on modern hardware via ports on compilations. Participants of the hobby are known as retrogamers in the United Kingdom, classic gamers, or old school gamers in the United States. Similarly, games that they play are known as retrogames, classic games, or old school games. Retrogaming is often linked to, although not the same as, indie gaming, the hobby of playing games that are not published by any conventional publisher.

In plain english, its about playing games that were created in the past ( whereas past is usually at least 4 years ago ) and ran on various computer systems, such as consoles, 8bit / 16bit systems etc. What makes them relevant today is that those games provide great game-play, the kind of game-play quality that one cannot usually find nowadays. Because they are created in the past those games look outdated ( sometimes very outdated, sometimes its just text ) but it usually doesn't matter. You don't have to go looking for game systems that would run those games on ebay or elsewhere ; there is at least one way to play them on any kind of computer, on any kind of operating system through the use of emulators. Here are some links to get you started.

Abandonware games
Retro gaming
MAME

Mobygames : the absolute games database on the Net.
The Legacy : another games database, a museum for old games, mainly ones running 16bit systems and the PCs.
Lemon Amiga : the best Amiga specific database of games. While you are at it, make sure you check out lemonade.
Home of the Underdogs : a museum for 'abandonware' games, which also offers downloads of those games
Abandonia : Much like the 'Home of the Underdogs', this site offers reviews and downloads for old games that run on the DOS platform

Think Commodore is a website about emulating old Commodore computers such as the C64 and the Amiga on your Macintosh. The website also covers subjects such as C64 or Amiga games, demos, music, how to copy files from your Mac back to your trusty old Commodore etc.

There is so much information on Amiga on Wikipedia, such as the history of the AmigaOS versions on Wikipedia.

There is an abundance of information on Commodore Amiga on the Net, which if of course true for just about everything nowadays. You can read about its software, its games and its demos, browse MobyGame's list of Amiga games or pay a visit to the lovely Lemon Amiga and The Legacy websites for reviews and information on even more Amiga games. I wish I had some space in my room to place an Amiga 1200 -- and I wish I could find one that I could afford on eBay..

Manfred Trenz fansite : The guy who built Turrican and other wonderful games on Commodore 64 ( ported to Amiga soon thereafter), a legend among in the Amiga world. Chris H?lsbeck is the guy who did the music for the game ( another living legend ).

An Introduction to AMIGA Programming Using C : The days of glory have come to pass..

My brother and I spent our days and nights on our most beloved Amiga computers. Besides playing games, we were using them to build stuff. Initially, we started with Microsoft Amiga Basic. As far as I can recall, the most advanced application we ever built with it was some sort of barebones database ( my brother did this ) and a 'fantasy' adventure game, whereas the graphics were drawn through series of LINE, POINT, COLOR and other 'cute' commands. Microsoft Basic wasn't really powerful, nor interesting, nor fast. It was bundled with our Amiga (500) though, which made it our starting point.

Sometime later, my brother cought a glimpse of some 'demos' running on an Amiga at this computer store downtown Herakio ('Mega Shop', folded a couple of years ago ). He was told the demos were made possible through AMOS, a super neat programming language. So we got outselves AMOS and started building stuff like crazy. AMOS was lights years away from the crappy Microsoft Basic. We could make games ( there was even an inline animation languaged, aptly named AMAL you could use to animate your 'blobs' -- p recursor to today's scripting languages -- like Lua and Python, or even quakeScript and UnrealScript -- used to control the logic of games ) and all sort of cool stuff. We must have built over a gazillion applications and games, most of those games being platformers and adventure games.. Around that time, my brother decided he wasn't very interested in programming after all and devoted his time solely into gaming.

I moved along and sometime later, our friend Myros ( he was our capital source of new softtware for our Amigas, for he was an avid player and knew the people who could provide him with games and apps ) gave us two diskettes containing 'Blitz Basic 1.0'. Blitz was a beast. This was a super fast, super powerful system that made AMOS look like a kiddy toy. It wasn't a beast easily tamed, but it allowed to build amazing applications and games. Soon, Blitz II came and made things even better. I spent endless days and nights building stuff with it. Workbench applications, RPGs, adventure games, shoot-em-ups.. you name it..

Then I moved to C. It was a love at the first sight. I love this language ( and its derivatives -- C++ and Objective C ) more than I could ever love any other language including my native language, but that's another story altogether. Anyhow, just like it has been the case with AMOS and Blitz II, there was no Internet access at the time, no documentation readily available, no nothing. All I could count on was finding some source code in various diskettes, perhaps even some Amiga magazines and lots of experimentation. It was hard, the compilers were crappy ( Lattice C and Aztec C), lots of floppy switching ( no hard disk at the time either ).. But still, C was the most amazing thing ever happened since sliced bread and even diet coke for me.

Later on, our father bought us the Amiga 1200. The computer of our dreams. Along that, we bought a 20G HD ( I still have it in my room, a tiny 3.5 one) and a few months later a modem. Our cousin was perhaps one of the first 5-10 individuals in the island of Crete to have access to the Internet, for he was building the software that enabled customers to connect to this experimental BBS Mega Shop was running and access the Internet. He got me into the whole Internet world and the rest is, as they say, history.

I was able to access the Aminet, the archive for games and applications, updated on a daily basis, and download all kinds of apps, games, documentation, media files. Among those wonderful files, I found this application 'Term' by Olaf `Olsen' Barthel. This app was considered the best of its kind, which basically enabled you to use your modem to connect to BBS, to other users computers, send files etc. It had a great UI, was super powerful and it was one of the best applications ever built for the Amiga, bar none.

Barthel, God bless him, released the source code of Term on Aminet as well. This was by far the single most precious and important finding on the Net for me. Beatiful C code, well documentated, taking advantage of so many Amiga features.. I learned from it so much, adopted his coding style, and made a habit of reading it over and over again. His work influenced my skills in such a great deal. In fact, I think everyone should have a look at it. The source code can be found here. You need LHA to extract the files (you can get it from here) and an editor to view them. Highly recommended.